Suffolk NYCLU > News/Press > January 8, 2004; Commission on Education Reform > Testimony

Testimony of Jared Feuer to the Governor’s Commission on Education Reform
Thursday, January 8, 2004 – Suffolk County, State Office Building 250 Veterans’ Memorial Highway, Classrooms 2 and 3, Hauppauge, NY

My name is Jared Feuer. I am the Executive Director of the New York Civil Liberties Union’s Suffolk Chapter, which covers the 1,450,000 individuals living in Suffolk County. The NYCLU has long been committed to enabling all students, regardless of background, to have access to an education that not only prepares them for the diverse opportunities of our great American economy, but just as important, enriches them with the wealth of knowledge that can and must be provided in our schools. To deny this education is counter to our State Constitution, and as access is apportioned along racial, regional and economic lines, it is discrimination in practice.

I want to thank you for listing to me, and for allowing myself and my fellow Suffolk residents to provide our thoughts and our insight. We all want the best for New York, and we all want the best for the generations that follow. Yet as I have talked to community members about our failing schools, all too often I hear the blame game. The School Board is blamed, the politicians are blamed, the students are blamed, the parents are blamed, culture is blamed. This is not a productive path for responsible adults to follow as it harms our children, and we know it. Please do not misunderstand me – the responsibility to provide a sound education is irrefutably the State’s. Our State Constitution and our Courts tell us so. And the State’s shirking of its responsibility has created damage that words can not express. We ask the State to use the Court ordered remedy in CFE as an opportunity to fix the failing schools throughout the state, to fulfill the constititutional obligation of a sound basic education to all children not just those in New York City. Behind this approach is the NYCLU’s assertion, as explained in its lawsuit in the Appellate Division, Third Dept (NYCLU v. State of New York) that New York City is not the only locale where schools are failing our students and that the solution is to meet the particular needs of our diverse schools. When the NYCLU looked beyond the New York City district, it found that school failure is not an inherent problem of urbanism and that general reputations conceal fundamental inconsistencies. Suffolk is a perfect example of these two findings. To those who are unfamiliar with our county, we might be seen as simply a white, upper-class suburb. In reality, Suffolk is a diverse county, with a population that is quickly becoming more diverse. 11% of our population is of Latino background and 7% is African American. Some of our communities skew wealthy, others are quite poor. The density of our towns varies widely, but what is essential to understand, and what Governor Pataki must come to truly accept, is that failing schools exist throughout our state, and in places not expected.

In the course of preparing our lawsuit, the NYCLU became familiar with the conditions and challenges facing teachers, administrators, students, and parents in 27 schools in 13 school districts outside of New York City. These 27 schools are emblems of hundreds of failing schools, and we believe that a review of these schools will reveal the need for a state-wide remedy where each school is to be provided with a solution tailored to its own needs.

Four of the 27 schools that the NYCLU examined in detail are in Long Island, and I am going to discuss two of them today – one in Suffolk County and one in Nassau County -- to illustrate how failing schools, despite their similar needs, have pressing concerns to be addressed as best fits the particular school.

The first school that I will discuss is Wyandanch Memorial High School, which enrolls students in the southwestern region of Suffolk. In fact, representatives of Wyandanch School District will be providing testimony immediately after my comments. As a quick snapshot of, we can note that Wyandanch Memorial was placed on the Schools Under Registration Review (SURR) list in December 2000, when it was a grade eight through grade twelve school. One year prior, in June 1999, the mathematics examination was failed by 99% of eighth graders. Just one student met the standards. When looking for what contributed to these results, we found that Wyandanch High has significant teacher turnover that contributes to the difficulties faced by its students. In 1999-2000, one in five of its teachers had been at the school for less than a year. There were shortages of teachers in English, math, science, social science and foreign languages. The school needed six reading teachers but there were only three. In addition, turnover among administrative and clerical staff compounds the lack of support staff, leading to dependency on temporary workers who come and go and create mass confusion for students. For eleven consecutive years, the school year began without a working master schedule, leading to such situations as students being assigned to four biology classes in the same semester. We believe that when New York State takes a look at Wyandanch Memorial, it will find a significant need to provide for a stable employment opportunity for teachers and one that offers opportunities for continued education, the correct tools to teach their students (we found that Wyandanch Memorial lacks adequate computers and science labs), and administrative stability. While this information comes from our complaint in 2001, we do not believe that the performance or conditions has changed materially since that time. And further, we know that the appalling conditions that we are describing have existed for many, many years, with the state fully aware. In fact, since 1969, thirty-five years ago, the state has known about the conditions in Wyandanch (and Roosevelt in Nassau County). At this point, we’re dealing with generations of neglect by the State.

Alverta B. Gray Schultz Middle School is a sixth-through-eighth grade school located in the Hempstead Union Free School district in the village of Hempstead, which is situated in Nassau County. The physical plant of Schultz Middle School is particularly unsuitable as a learning environment. With over 1,200 students – 200 of whom were added due to massive overcrowding in the district’s elementary schools -- the school has long since outgrown its space. Rooms must be split to create additional classrooms, the library can only handle 100 students and it lacks even a card catalogue; there is no auditorium, so the upstairs gym has become the auditorium – and the hybrid auditorium/gymnasium is dilapidated with peeling and rotting walls, torn safety padding, and rusty hooks that hand on the walls. The cafeteria is so small that the school had to create a separate cafeteria for the sixth graders that lacks a fire exit, but to also schedule four lunch periods – the earliest starting at 10:20 ensuring that the students with the early lunch will be too hungry to concentrate by the end of the day. When New York State takes a close look at Schultz Middle School in Hempstead, we believe it will find the physical plant to be high on the list of necessary remedies.

Although many of the schools might differ in their pressing need, we found that all shared the same basic conditions – they are overcrowded, lack teacher and administrator stability, parental involvement, and have poor physical plants and a lack of modern supplies. The question is how to address these problems, and in what ways. Fiscal resources are a significant need, as the failing schools that we examined were severely under-funded. A recent national study by Education Week ranked New York State #1 in the nation in the quality of its standards, but #48 in the equity of its school finance system. Clearly, there is a breakdown in commitment between those dictating the standards and those providing the funding. But we do not want New York to only provide increased fiscal resources for its troubled schools. Money is a pre-requisite but a more comprehensive solution is required. Moreover, many communities can not tax themselves into adequate funding. Hempstead taxes itself at twice the rate of the more prosperous area of Great Neck, and yet due to its lower tax base, it yields half the revenue. New York must dedicate itself to examining how to devote custom-built resources for each school, and create regular programs for follow-up. We believe that New York State will need to develop teacher training programs, provide continuing education opportunities for faculty, create programs for increased parental involvement, and target where fiscal resources can best be used.

I’d like to take a moment to expand on the question of funding. When New York State empowers task groups to develop remedies for failing schools, the necessary steps they conclude are going to carry a price tag. We can’t think otherwise, and we can’t continue to look away. What we need to do, actually, is take a step back, and look with a wider lens. New York State’s finances are tied directly to the students that we educate. If we provide our children with a good education, they will grow up familiar with current knowledge, science, culture and technology, and be productive and engaged member of our State as adults. They will also become good taxpayers. But if our students are not provided with this educational foundation, they will not only provide little to the State Treasury; they will be dependent on public assistance. So this is a funding issue all right, but it is not a cost, it is an investment. Words carry tremendous meaning and importance, and I urge the commission to drop the word “cost” for the more accurate word of “investment.” Similarly, I urge the commission to impress upon Governor Pataki that he take an approach that looks at the long term interests of his state by providing for sufficient education for all members of the next generation.

There is one more point that I want to make – a final shared condition that we found in many, but not all, of the failing schools is that they are in minority-majority districts, and poor. In 1998-1999, 91.3% of Wyandanch Memorial students were African America, 7.9% were of Latino descent and 0.8% were white. Almost 70% of the student’s families were receiving public assistance. Alverta B. Gray Schultz Middle School has a student population that in 1998-1999, was 68.9% African-American, 29.3% of Latino descent and 1.5% white. 89.9% of the students received a free or reduced-price lunch, and 81-90% of their families receive public assistance. The reality is that when you look at neglected schools that lack even the basic necessities to educate their students, you find that they are populated by minorities and by the poor. New York State’s education system, from rural to suburban and urban, from Buffalo to Albany to Suffolk, discriminates based on the background into which our children are born. That is a reality that the Governor must accept.

Why does Governor Pataki have such a responsibility? In part, because the decision in CFE v New York State in 1995 declared that the New York State Constitution requires a sound basic education, and in 2003, the Court of Appeals in CFE II ruled that such an education is “a meaningful high school education,” that provides students with the skill to function capably as civic participants, to be prepared for employment in the 21st century. But this is not just a Constitutional issue, an economic issue, or even a discrimination issue. We are discussing a moral issue today. Education is the basis for how we perceive the world, how we use existing knowledge to process new information, how we decipher problems and devise solutions. And this quest to develop an appropriate New York State educational system is such a challenge. The Suffolk NYCLU strongly encourages the Commission to approach this problem methodically and with flexibility. And to recommend to Governor Pataki, a process for the State to provide state education officials who will meet with local school officials and parents and community representatives, as well as education experts, and to develop, collectively, a remedial plan tailored to each of these failing schools that the State will then be required to fund and to implement. When this problem is addressed across New York, we will have a public school system that meets the requirements of Article XI, Section 1 of our State Constitution, and one in which we can be proud.

It is my hope that I have proven that failure exists not just in New York City, but across our state in similar and divergent ways, and why Governor Pataki must act. The Suffolk NYCLU thanks you for your time, and we offer any assistance that the Commission might find helpful.